Friday, August 11, 2006

"Consider an analogy that the antiwar types hold dear: Iraq as Vietnam. I reject the premise, but let's assume it for the purpose of following the political consequences of antiwar movements.

The anti-Vietnam War movement had its political successes. They were, as in Connecticut Tuesday, mostly internecine. One Democratic presidency was destroyed (Lyndon Johnson), as was the candidacy of his would-be successor, Hubert Humphrey.

Like Iraq, Vietnam was but one theater in a larger global struggle -- the struggle against the Soviet Union and its communist clients around the world -- and by the early 1970s, the newly reshaped McGovernite party had to face the larger post-Vietnam challenges of the Cold War. The result? Political disaster.

The anti-Vietnam sentiment left a residual pacifism, an aversion to intervention and an instinct for accommodation that proved very costly to the Democrats for years to come. The most notorious example was the liberal flight to the "nuclear freeze" -- the most mindless strategic idea of our lifetime -- in opposition to Ronald Reagan's facing down the Soviet deployment of missiles in Eastern Europe.

Apart from the Carter success of 1976 -- an idiosyncratic post-Watergate accident -- the "blame America first" Democrats were not even competitive on foreign policy for the rest of the Cold War. It was not until the very disappearance of the Soviet Union that the American citizenry would once again trust a Democrat with the White House.Charles Krauthammer"

"WASHINGTON--My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing--in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against "communists and their fellow travelers." The word "McCarthyism" became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right's fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a "communist" or "socialist" who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.

I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years--with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage--I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

• "Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby" (by "rim," posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).

• "Joe's on the Senate floor now and he's growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate" (by "ctkeith," posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).

• On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

• "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).

"Heretofore the Six have been vague about their response to an Iranian refusal to negotiate, except for unspecific threats of sanctions through the United Nations Security Council. But if a deadlock between strained forbearance by the Six and taunting invective from the Iranian president leads to de facto acquiescence in the Iranian nuclear program, prospects for multilateral international order will dim everywhere. If the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany are unable jointly to achieve goals to which they have publicly committed themselves, every country, especially those composing the Six, will face growing threats, be they increased domestic pressure from radical Islamic groups, terrorist acts or the nearly inevitable conflagrations sparked by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The analogy of such a disaster is not Munich, when the democracies yielded the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, but the response when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. At Munich, the democracies thought that Hitler's demands were essentially justified by the principle of self-determination; they were repelled mostly by his methods. In the Abyssinian crisis, the nature of the challenge was uncontested. By a vast majority, the League of Nations voted to treat the Italian adventure as aggression and to impose sanctions. But they recoiled before the consequences of their insight and rejected an oil embargo, which Italy would have been unable to overcome. The league never recovered from that debacle. If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or functioning institutions."

Monday, August 07, 2006

Democrats abandon IsraelThe Democrats have completly lost their way.I have said many times that in the liberal Weltanschauung there is no good or evil. It's all relative! That is why, when faced with evil, the left is paralyzed.We are faced now with the greatest evil since Hitler, fascism and Tojo's Japan.

"A popular Government, withoutpopular information, or the meansof acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or,perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And apeople who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselveswith the power which knowledge gives."

HELP!

Has the GOP abandoned us?

What would Ronnie say?

Government's view of the economycould be summed up in a few shortphrases:If it moves,tax it.If it keeps moving,regulate it.And if it stops moving,subsidize it.-- Ronald Reagan"We've gone astray from first principles. We've lost sight of the rulethat individual freedom and ingenuity are at the very core of everythingthat we've accomplished. Government's first duty is to protect the people,not run their lives." ---Ronald Reagan (http://Reagan2020.US/)

the best one-liner ever

right links

election quotes

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the leastdisappointing." ---Bernard Baruch

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as theservant." ---Charles de Gaulle

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he wouldpromise them missionaries for dinner." ---H. L. Mencken

"We'd all like to vote for the best man but he's never a candidate." ---KinHubbard

LGF headlines

What would Ronnie do?

Bobby Jindal, the new Reagan?

if I were aliberal Democrat from a bluestate, I’d want to stop lookingback at Reagan, too. But asconservatives, we should look tohim as a great leader and a greatexample of the success we canenjoy by going back to ourprinciples. Take Louisiana. Thestorms didn’t cause all theproblems for Louisiana; theyrevealed a lot of the problems. Itis frustrating to see Republicansrush in to put billions of dollarsinto the same programs thatdidn’t work before the storms,instead of being more bold. Webelieve that private health carecoverage, not government-runhealth care, works. Why notimplement that, now thatwe’ve got such an opportunityto rebuild the health careinfrastructure?